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Alton Towers Social Media

I'm in my early twenties and this marketing feels so grossly awful. If I hadn't visited the park before and had no knowledge of it, I'd assume they're advertising some awfully tacky beach that might have a coaster and a mediocre chippy virtually built-in. It's genuinely exceptionally embarrasing to watch these bits of marketing - but hey, at least there aren't many typos...
 
As other posters have mentioned, their recent attempts at social media marketing just screams of trying to be ‘down with the kids’. I’m definitely not a fan. I can’t see non enthusiasts finding it too endearing either but I could be wrong. Something about it just completely misses the mark.

I can’t decide if it’s worse than their penchant for making up their own words in their marketing material(fantabulous, thrilliant etc) but it’s pretty damn close to that level of cringe.

Someone please make it stop.
 
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I initially thought the new social media content exec might have been fresh out of uni - it transpires they've been in the video content game predominantly for some years now before joining Merlin and Towers.

I'll avoid naming names as they've had a fair amount of stick on Twitter, and he is only human afterall, but I just wonder where the hell the overall direction is in terms of social. If I had started with my current employer and went totally off piste in this manner with no social strategy in place, questions would be asked.
 
As an old man with limited communication skills, I have just discovered that you don't actually need to watch these videos, if you avoid pressing the little red and white triangle in the middle of the screen.
I'm glad I'm old, I haven't suffered a single one.
 
You can only imagine that they have been given free reign to do whatever they like. You'd have thought the head of marketing (or whatever that role at Towers is these days) would be setting a strategy, and the person in charge of social media would be following that.
 
Merlin love sharing knowledge and experience internally, which makes it even more suprising how bad this is.

In fairness, Thorpe are probably the best in the business when it comes to social media. I'm not the target market but can see that their output is engaging, funny and professional.

Are they not consulting the team at Thorpe to help out? Towers have been rubbish at this for years now.

Maybe they have done recently and this is the result, they're trying something different but have got it badly wrong so far.
 
Thorpe's target market is very different to Towers and they'd be better suited to two very different approaches. In this instance it'd be more beneficial to have the two separate from a best practice knowledge sharing perspective, and conduct a thorough audit of the Towers channels and proceed from there. The comments from the public are very consistent in the replies and there is no real drive to address this.

Paultons are doing great on social at the moment - they have the perfect blend of non-intrusive promotional-type content, and their behind-the-scenes stuff for the geeks is fascinating.

I miss the old Kentucky Kingdom social media postings. They were wild.
 
I think the problem is posting nothing to posting a lot and none of it is relevant to what’s going on at towers or in the community or general viral news. It’s old cringy memes.

It’s where chessington and Thorpe excel, they engage and it’s very two way between you and them as a customer. Alton towers is very much one way, no real replies.

Also they both seem to hop on trends quickly and don’t do out of date trends.
 
As I’m not really up with social media trends, I showed some of these to my sister to see what she thought given that the forum has been up in arms about it.

She has recently completed a degree with a heavy component of social media marketing and done various work placements involving social media marketing, so I figured that she was probably on board with current social media marketing trends.

She said the first tweet was “just plain weird”.

She said that the memes were “fine”. She said “They’re a bit weird, but social media marketing is a bit weird these days. As much as the forumers may not like it, this is the sort of thing that engages young people in this day and age”.

She said that the text-to-speech video was “not a bad idea, but very poorly executed”. She thought that the random integration of slang felt “clunky”, and that the different voices overlapping “just [felt] lazy given that you can easily edit to not make that happen”.

Personally, I find it all a bit strange, but as I say, I’m not really on board with current social media trends at all, so I thought I’d show the material to my sister, someone far more on board with current trends in social media marketing, and see what she thought. I found it interesting hearing her opinions.
 
It's a little strange in terms of if you look at their tiktok page it seems since this pivot to more meme/trend based videos they are receiving a lot less engagement compare do the videos that were a lot more focused about the park and rides itself. They were getting views in the 100k to even a million a couple times so not sure why they've taken this turn, doesn't seem a successful strategy judging by that at least. (Added the image to demonstrate when it looks like they started this pivot)

alton towers tiktok.png
 
Eidderf said:
It's a little strange in terms of if you look at their tiktok page it seems since this pivot to more meme/trend based videos they are receiving a lot less engagement compare do the videos that were a lot more focused about the park and rides itself. They were getting views in the 100k to even a million a couple times so not sure why they've taken this turn, doesn't seem a successful strategy judging by that at least. (Added the image to demonstrate when it looks like they started this pivot)

alton towers tiktok.png
Click to expand...

You cannot measure engagement by those metrics. All their new stuff is new. So it is naturally going to have less views. Their older content has been up longer, it will have gained more views.

To properly see engagement, you need to see specific views over specific time frames. Something we do not have access to..
 
DistortAMG said:
You cannot measure engagement by those metrics. All their new stuff is new. So it is naturally going to have less views. Their older content has been up longer, it will have gained more views.

To properly see engagement, you need to see specific views over specific time frames. Something we do not have access to..
Click to expand...

From my experience using tiktok (I have a relatively popular tiktok profile, not to toot my own horn) things generally either blow up quickly or don't. I've rarely had a video that is months old jump up in numbers by very much.

Youtube is another story where whatever algorithm they have sometimes randomly spits out an old video to everyone out of seemingly nowhere, but with tiktok things tend to hit fast or not at all and are quickly overshadowed by whatever new thing takes their place.

You are right though in that time will tell, guess we have to give it a few months and see. I'm just using anecdotal evidence and speculating so doesn't mean much.
 
This is in response to the socual today about implying everyone over 30 is old..

Not defending the crap socials but I do not think it is implying that at all.

As they ask a question at the start. Then that is an answer to said question. If you read it without the question, it appears they are implying it, but with it, it doesn't.

Context is everything.
 
The most jarring thing for me is the blatantly casual text with imperfect SPAG (fine if that’s what you’re going for, it’s how people message these days) but then chucking in “Alton Towers Resort” as though they’re still going for a really corporate stance. No one calls it that in general conversation!
 
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